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Artist Megumi Igarashi outside court in Tokyo, demonstrating the correct attitude to being convicted and fined for distributing one’s own vagina. Photo by Kazuhiro Nogi for AFP.

I seem to be mainly posting about genitals recently, but whatever. Agence France-Presse reports that Japanese artist Megumi Igarashi has just been fined ¥400,000 (about £2,500, €3.200 or $3,700) for crowdfunding a project to make a kayak based on a 3D scan of her vagina, said scan being made available to supporters as a perk. Yes, really. The only thing more (unwittingly) absurd than her (knowingly absurd) project? She was arrested for it, and the Japanese authorities have wasted taxpayers’ money in prosecuting her, then arrested her again for making plaster models and giving away vagina-data CDs. She’s going to appeal the sentence.

“My art has been commended as being strongly vaginal, which bothers some men. The word itself makes some men uncomfortable. Vagina… Yes, they don’t like hearing it and find it difficult to say whereas without batting an eye a man will refer to his dick or his rod or his Johnson.”

It’s hard to avoid the suspicion that somebody has it in for her, or at least that she got somebody in particular’s knickers in a twist, because although depictions of genitalia are technically (and stupidly) illegal in Japan the country is absolutely awash in traditional images of genitalia, not to mention good, bad and ugly pornography addressing every sexual practice, fetish and kink known to humanity and a few unknown to pretty much everybody apart from the Japanese. Why the authorities are picking on Igarashi in particular is a mystery… Especially when meanwhile in Kawasaki, among other places, this is happening:

Lafcadio Hearn, in his Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan (1894), sums up nicely how I feel about the place over a century later: “The largest steamer that crosses the Pacific could not contain what you wish to purchase. For, although you may not, perhaps, confess the fact to yourself, what you really want to buy is […]